The Spy's Gamble by Howard Kaplan

Author:Howard Kaplan [Kaplan, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Howard Kaplan
Published: 2018-06-04T22:00:00+00:00

At sixty-one, Paul McEnnerney believed himself testament that people changed little. He still favored the comfortable linen pants and shirts he had in his youth when he first became a CIA field operative, though more color now rather than all white. He gazed at the staid yet stylish brown, round Persol shades on his desk, though he sometimes missed the flashy Vuarnet wraparounds. He was proud that he came from old money, but felt no disdain for the high-tech millionaires descending on Washington as their next playground. He did enjoy that they were discovering that this city venerated team sports and lone hotshots were most often treated like pesky flies and swatted against the glass.

As he waited to impart the big news to Collins, he gazed at the photos on his windowsill of his daughter, Jessica, riding horses and several of his wife in their vast flower garden, her favorite spot on the planet. His globe-hopping days were gladly behind him and he thoroughly enjoyed soaring with the winds in the Langley stratosphere. He had married late and Jessica was in her sophomore year of high school at the prestigious Sidwell Friends, a Quaker establishment founded in the rather fanciful belief there is God in everyone. After decades in the world’s cesspools, McEnnerney was entirely certain God could not be dug up anywhere, but his wife was a less lapsed Catholic and what mattered to her, and eventually to him too, was the school’s academic excellence and reputation for being, as the beatniks would have said, “square.” The school prided itself in inspiring active care of the environment, global citizenship, and service, all of which McEnnerney valued, as deep down, despite his veneer, he was fairly square himself, which is how he landed in the CIA to start with. He wanted to serve, albeit with a good deal of excitement. Sidwell fostered reflection and shared silence, with the goal of students finding deeper truths about themselves, “to let their lives speak”—none of which McEnnerney was any good at, and thought was mostly hogwash, but he wanted his daughter to lead a richer existence than his.

He looked up at a knock on his office door and Collins entered without waiting to be invited. “You found the sub!”

“I think it would be more accurate to say it found us.”

McEnnerney slid several satellite photos across his immaculate shiny desk and Collins grabbed them and looked. There the sub was, surfaced in calm waters.

“As carefree as a rubber ducky in a tub,” McEnnerney said.

“Nothing on the news channels. I checked. Any communication with it?”

“None, other than the emergency locator signal pinging ‘here I am.’ Rather insistently.”

“Nobody answers your attempts to hail her?”

“Precisely.”

“Where is it?”

“The Puerto Rico Trench, the boundary between the Caribbean and the Atlantic. Happens to be the deepest spot in the Atlantic.”

“It’s been hiding in those depths?”

“With its stealth capabilities, it could have been hiding about anywhere.” McEnnerney checked his large Blancpain Le Brassus watch, the internal workings of the mechanism visible through the rest of the open face.

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